Fran Healy's becoming time after time a better singer: you can so clearly see it while he gives passionate tones to the words he's singing and still, when you hear a track like "Dear Diary" you would like to choke him.
The track has got a very lovely lyric: it's so tearful and powerful to listen to them written, you can almost touch the feeling he has got, about being sad even if rationally he doesn't feel so, cos of a disillusion of love (for sure )which has got him into.
But you can't forgive him for the soppy dishearted tone of the song.. so difficult to finish you feel airless in a chopping way.

Pity even more cos it's placed before one of the highlights of the album, the wonderful Side.

Even the first track, Sing, it's disappointing in a way: here Fran clearly fails to come up with a great lyric for underline that beautiful melody and neverthless you love the song (cos it still so damn catchy, it isn't?) you keep on feel some missing.
It's the pattern of most of this album: somewhere it lacks something.
It's frustrating, cos you can't define this record "bad" but you feel it doesn't even deserve to be named as "good" and you got sad cos you know it could have been.
Really easily as well...if *only* they....
Wanted it.
Yeah, That's it.

From Side to Follow The Light included the album is okay: they are tunes there, some of them in the best Travis' style, sweet but powerful also (IE: "Flowers In The Window")
or so serious and moving you can't avoid to whisper thinkin of them (The Cage ) or peculiar till the point you feel good with Fran without a decent reason for it (Safe).

Then it comes again that feeling of disappointment and it surpasses the pleasure when you hear or a good melody with a too strange series of words or a great lyric without an appropiate melody.

Travis are masters in creating catching melodies.. so why the hell you don't even care sometimes about it?

This is The Invisible Band: and it's not even a bad record.
The point is is not either a great one.

7 on 10
reviewed by gallimel